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Hawkish Biases-Website ∗ Hawkish Biases Daniel Kahneman Jonathan Renshon Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Emeritus Department of Government Woodrow Wilson School Harvard University Princeton University [email protected] [email protected] Daniel Kahneman is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his work on prospect theory and decision-making under uncertainty. Jonathan Renshon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Renshon studies national security decision-making, foreign policy analysis and political psychology. He is the author of Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (Greenwood, 2006), and his work has appeared in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Political Psychology, Foreign Policy and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. ∗ This essay appears in a slightly shorter and modified form in Trevor Thrall and Jane Cramer (eds.) American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation Since 9/11 (New York: Routledge Press, 2009), 79-96. In a short article in Foreign Policy in 2007, we put forward a hypothesis of “directionality” in cognitive biases that generated a fair amount of debate and some controversy (Kahneman and Renshon 2007). This chapter is an attempt to expand upon and clarify our original argument. In the last few decades, cognitive and social psychologists have described many cognitive biases –predictable errors in the ways that individuals interpret information and make decisions.1 An unexpected and significant pattern emerges when theses biases are viewed as a set: we find, almost without exception, that the biases recently uncovered by psychological research favor hawkish decisions in conflict situations. We use the term “hawkish” to describe a propensity for suspicion, hostility and aggression in the conduct of conflict, and for less cooperation and trust when the resolution of a conflict is on the agenda. Actors who are susceptible to hawkish biases are not only more likely to see threats as more dire than an objective observer would perceive, but are also likely to act in a way that will produce unnecessary conflict. We do not contend, of course, that all decisions in the international political context will be hostile or aggressive as a result of biases of cognition and preference, only that more decisions will be so more often than they would be in the absence of bias. Nor do we contend that all suspicions are produced by biased thinking, and therefore unjustified. Our point is only that the collective effect of the biases that psychology has identified is to increase the probability that agents will act more hawkishly than an objective observer would deem appropriate. For a more concrete image, suppose that a national leader is exposed to conflicting advice from a hawk and a dove. Our contention is that cognitive biases will tend to make the hawk’s arguments more persuasive than they deserve to be. The biases discussed in this chapter pose a difficult methodological problem for political scientists, since we cannot “prove” the bias to have been at fault in any given decision. Instead, we define the bias and invite readers to consider its consequences in conflict situations by invoking a hypothetical objective observer. We can only hope that 1 More specifically, a bias exists when an error in estimating or assessing a value is more likely in one direction than another. For example, in estimating our own skills as drivers, a bias exists because we are far more likely to over-estimate our abilities relative to others than to under-estimate them. In the absence of an objective criterion, we take the opinions of knowledgeable but uninvolved observer as a definition of an unbiased judgment. The perspective of history provides another “unbiased” view of the situation that decision makers faced. 1 this perspective allows dispassionate analysts to take that role. And we can only hope that the retrospective judgments are not overly tainted by the familiar hindsight bias, which makes it all too easy to explain past disasters by finding flaws in the decisions of actors who cannot defend themselves. The test of our approach is whether it offers historians and political scientists a useful heuristic. The biases that we list are to be viewed as hypotheses, to be confirmed by examining evidence of what the decision makers believed, desired or feared at the critical time. For example, students of conflict should expect to find evidence of unreasonably negative interpretations of the opponent’s intentions, and overly optimistic assessments of the situation by both sides, because these biases have been established by prior research. In our original analysis, we compiled a list of known biases, and proceeded to trace the implications of those biases for international conflict. This chapter proceeds in much the same way. For each bias, we first present empirical evidence illustrating how and when it is likely to affect judgment and decision-making. Note that the evidence on which we rely was documented in experimental situations that did not involve conflict – the biases are considered to be general features of cognition and preference. We then proceed to examine the potential behavioral implications of each bias in situations in international conflict. The biases and their main effects are listed in Table 1. 2 Table 1. Biases examined in this chapter Bias Primary Effect in Conflict Situations POSITIVE ILLUSIONS Biased overconfidence raises the probability of violent conflict occurring and of deadlock in negotiations (when the parties overestimate their bargaining position or ability) FAE Perceive hostile actions of adversaries as due to unchanging, dispositional factors and discount the role of contextual factors; neglect the effects of one’s own hostility on the behavior of adversaries ILLUSION OF Ignore how one’s actions are likely to be perceived by others, resulting TRANSPARENCY in behavior that is likely to provoke aggression or hostility ENDOWMENT EFFECT/LOSS Induces an aversion to making concessions and a reluctance to accept AVERSION objectively “fair” exchanges. RISK SEEKING IN LOSSES Reluctance to settle, prolongation of conflict PSEUDO-CERTAINTY Lowers probability of concessions if there is a potential that those concessions might advantage an opponent in a possible future conflict and concurrently raises the probability of conflict occurring by adopting a worst-case scenario of the other’s intentions. REACTIVE DEVALUATION Unconscious devaluation of offers, concessions or plans suggested by rivals or adversaries makes it difficult to reach agreement. 3 Positive Illusions One of the most robust findings in cognitive and social psychology is that individuals often fall victim to “positive illusions.”2 Among these positive illusions are: unrealistically positive views of one’s abilities and character, the illusion of control, and unrealistic optimism (Taylor and Brown 1988: 195-6). Unrealistically positive views of the self have been documented in many domains. Among other things, most people believe themselves to be better than average drivers, decision-makers and negotiators (Svenson 1981: 143; Bazerman 1998: 69). A survey of university professors found that 94 percent believed themselves to be better teachers than the average at their institution, which of course is a statistical impossibility (Cross 1977). Because individuals resist information that conflicts with positive self-assessments, these unrealistically positive views of oneself are generally robust over time (Crary 1966: 246; Marks 1984: 203). The “illusion of control” is an exaggerated perception of the extent to which outcomes depend on one’s actions. When people were given a button and instructed to cause a particular color to appear on the screen, they erroneously believed that they had substantial control over events, even when the outcomes were actually determined by a computer (Martin, Abramson et al. 1984). Experiments have shown that people act as if they can control the outcome of rolling a die, and are more willing to bet when they do the rolling (Silverman 1964: 114; Langer 1975: 312,324; Campbell 1986: 290). It has also been demonstrated that stress (common in conflict or crisis decision-making) increases the preference for strategies that engender a feeling of control, even if it is illusory, and even if it leads to worse outcomes (Friedland, Keinan et al. 1992: 923). In a competitive situation, the illusion of control causes each side to believe that the outcome of the competition depends mostly on its own actions and abilities, even when it depends equally on the achievements of competitors. The third positive illusion is “unrealistic optimism.” The evidence for “illusory,” or biased, optimism comes from the comparisons of individuals’ judgments of themselves 2 There is an important caveat to the findings described in this section. The first is that there may well be cultural variation in unrealistic optimism. Some studies have found that individuals from societies that do not place much emphasis on the individual are less likely to evince “self-enhancing” biases such as unrealistic optimism. As an example, one study found that Japanese were much less likely than Canadians to demonstrate unrealistic optimism. See (Heine and Lehman 1995). 4 and of others. People generally believe that the probability of positive outcomes (such as having a gifted child, or enjoying their first job) is higher for themselves than for their peers, and judge the probability of negative events (such as being the victim of a crime or being in a car accident) as less likely for themselves than for others (Robertson 1977: 136; Weinstein 1980: 806; Perloff and Fetzer 1986: 502). In addition, experimental evidence suggests that people’s predictions of what will occur correspond closely to what they would like to happen, rather than what is objectively likely to occur (Sherman 1980: 211).
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